Tempest
by fleurs-du-mol
Summary: Everyone now thought Sherlock barely tolerated Lestrade, but he wished he could explain how that wasn't true. It was true that Sherlock was brusque. He always had been. But there was a nuance, a twinge, to the people he tolerated. If he worked with you, he liked you. Working was probably the most solid way he had of expressing affection. Sherstrade.


The scenes inundate Lestrade without warning as he glances through his office window to catch John and Sherlock chortling at each other. He smiles, even though his reaction is almost visceral.

He suddenly sees Sherlock, young and long limbed, no less arrogant but more inclusive in his escapades. Paris slick and gray in the rain. A hotel room that sometimes he tells himself he would rather forget, and then other times, he wishes could have turned into more than a few days.

That was almost eight years ago now, if memory serves. The bars, the smoke, the girls that both of them realized were less intriguing than the body right next to them. Sitting, drinking absinthe, flicking away the ash of a cigarette. Talking, comparing notes, laughing about how the suspect was probably right under their eyes. A girl from Pigalle or one of the young bar-backs. Lestrade was on vacation, newly promoted, and then Sherlock had called him.

It was like that, early on: Sherlock calling him instead of the other way around.

Lestrade remembers him as being bright, vivid, still as hard to keep up with but far less cold. Even Sherlock Holmes had to be affected somehow by all the traumatic things he'd seen.

They ended up catching the man in an alleyway off the Boulevard de Clichy, not very far from where Lautrec's studio was and Van Gogh had rented rooms.

Lestrade was helping a Parisian friend who was in a similar situation as him. Recently moved up in the ranks, bewildered, but ready.

The friend came with his backup and took the man away. The criminal that time was a serial rapist, the worst of his kind because he could blend in and appear out of nowhere. Sherlock caught him, but then, Sherlock always did.

The detective and the D.I. stayed behind, looking at each other and grinning like fools. Water was pelting down from the iron sky, drenching them in a winter downpour. It was hard to say how it happened… but then they were kissing, pressed against the concrete wall of a shop, Sherlock pulling Lestrade to him, breath hot and hands insistent. Even when drunk they hadn't tried, although interest and tension were running equally high, fostered by alcohol and the lurid electro music.

Everyone now thought Sherlock barely tolerated Lestrade, but he wished he could explain how that wasn't true. It was true that Sherlock was brusque. He always had been. But there was a nuance, a twinge, to the people he tolerated. If he worked with you, he liked you. Working was probably the most solid way he had of expressing affection.

The secondary way, and Lestrade suspected this had more to do with Sherlock's lack of social awareness, was, quite simply, sex. Everyone also thought of Sherlock as asexual, but when a person was that intense, the excess had to go somewhere. It didn't mean he was promiscuous: far from it.

But such a cerebral man probably found it easier to express emotion— the most nebulous of concepts— through physicality.

They made it out of the alley and back to their room, stealing kisses and touches on the metro. It was lucky they were in Paris, where no one cared, and not London, where people might. The rain got worse. They were dripping inside the lobby but the concierge only smiled at them.

Right now, Lestrade wishes that night, and the few that followed, could have become more lasting. But he knows he feels that way only because when Sherlock is around John, he can see Sherlock minus almost a decade of case-chasing. The Sherlock that had made love to him, the one who bought sweets from carts in the Latin Quarter, the one who flirted with the waitresses— in fluent French— because he liked to see them smirk.

And he'd changed.

No one could love a tempest of a man without spending themselves away, anyway.


End file.
